Sports Fans, Identity, and Socialization by Adam C. Earnheardt

Author:Adam C. Earnheardt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739146224
Publisher: Lexington Books

An integral part of sport fandom is the community that develops among supporters of a team. Fans identify with each other through their shared passion forming bonds stemming from shared experiences of team success and failure. Turner (1974) wrote about a rich sense of community called communitas, which he argued was a sense of togetherness that extends beyond normal boundaries of community and transcends ethnic, religious, gender, and class lines. Sports are cultural rituals that function to create communitas (Trujillo, 1992) and they have important cultural consequences because they create a vital part of individual identity and bring large groups of individuals, who may share nothing else in common, together as an organized collective (fans). But unlike a traditional organized collective, members of a sport fan community spend a large part of their time physically and communicatively apart from each other. While there remain important gathering places for fans such as stadiums, arenas or sports bars, much of one’s time in sport fandom is spent separated and alone.

Fans have traditionally overcome this sense of separation through the use of mass media outlets which provide sports news coverage enabling fans to connect with their team. Functioning like meetings and memos in traditional organizations, the media provide information, opinions, and perspective about the concerns and issues facing a team and its fans. The contemporary sports fan can learn, read, watch and exhaustively follow almost any sport team on the planet through their use of mass media and the Internet. Since most fans receive the majority of their sports organization-related messages from the media those mediated messages are crucially important to understanding fanhood.

An individual’s knowledge of a sports organization is a defining aspect of being a fan. Fans seek as much information as they can about their favorite teams and players, particularly through mass media outlets dedicated to providing sports related news and information. Even within a culture of urgency dominated by a win-now mentality, the media pay tribute to and publicize the histories of sports organizations more so than other organizations in society. The reclamation of past triumphs and failures recognizes and reinforces the importance of organizational history and emphasizes the necessity of shared experiences to the notion of fanhood.

Hills (2002) argues that being a fan is not just a label or a category but rather an identity and a performance. “Much of what makes someone a fan is what is located within her or his personal identity, memories, thoughts and social interaction” (Crawford, 2004, p. 4). Thus to understand the sport fan we need to consider the process and development of their identification with a team and socialization as a fan, much of which occurs through messages presented by the media. Jacobson (2003) argues that while literature on sport fans has addressed reasons individuals find sports to be enjoyable it has yet to adequately address why one particular team is chosen over another and how this affiliation forms. Part of forming an authentic fanhood is the assimilation of organizational history messages

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